This is where we have a fundamentally different opinion: Because I think we can blame Arena for not immediately switching to XFEN when it was proposed as a standard. There was no reason at all to not do it. X-FEN was identical to what Arena already did in the cases where the latter worked. It was only different for the cases where Arena failed to do it right anyway. So there were no compatibility issues with existing engines that would preclude adoptation of X-FEN by Arena many years ago. What worked would have continued to work.Alexander Schmidt wrote:All I said is: Arena FRC support came before x-fen. So you can't blame Arena for not supporting x-fen.
I would probably still have used Shredder FEN in WinBoard, though, because UCI uses it, and engines that can read X-FEN can automatically read Shredder FEN anyway. Unless they are intentionally sabotaged not to understand them, and why would I pay attention to that? There are a zillions of other ways for authors to wreck their own engine, let them do it if they want...
but certainly not FRC. It is a truly ugly (pseudo-)variant. If you are bored with normal Chess, because it has been beaten to death by opening theory, try Spartan Chess. This (just-invented) variant is a real beauty. About the same complexity as normal Chess (8x8 board, 2x16 pieces, half of which pawn-like, no pieces stronger than Queen), but only 20% draw rate (where Chess has about 32%). I can truly recommend it.
